David Broder in the Washington Post:
“Friday morning’s announcement of much better job statistics did what Bush himself could not do.”
Los Angeles Times:
Elsewhere in the same editon of the Los Angeles Times:
CIO Today:
Compare the headline, “U.S. Job Growth Falls Short of Expectations,” with the text: “The report was roughly in line with Wall Street forecasts of 150,000 new jobs.”
The Australian:
“August figure almost met expectations”
TheStreet.com
“The week ended with the Labor Department’s monthly payrolls report coming in right about as predicted, the first time that’s happened in four months.”
Bloomberg:
“The Labor Department’s report last week on jobs suggested growth has perked”
Taipei Times:
“The figures, showing an increase of 144,000 jobs last month, roughly in line with market expectations, helped send the London FTSE 100 index to its best daily … ”
Reuters:
“The jobs report that nearly matched analyst expectations helped stem losses on the index. … ”
Associated Press:
“Technology stocks led Wall Street lower Friday after an uninspiring employment report failed to mitigate investors’ concerns over Intel Corp.’s profit outlook.”
What’s most interesting about the jobs numbers is this: How often they are later revised, even significantly.
So it’s hard to take them seriously.
Very, very minor point, but “The Labor Department’s report last week on jobs suggested growth has perked”, should be “… has perked up.”
Dom
Even the 144K number (which is just about even with workforce growth) is less than half what the Administration predicted for now in February. In fact, we are a million jobs, in total, short of their February prediction. Maybe the papers were comparing the actual count not with analysts’ expectations, but with the consistently-ridiculous economic estimates (Bush SotU 2002: deficit will be small and temporary) they receive from the Administration.